Political Quotes

“Today is April 15. This is the day that our income taxes are due, a day that is difficult enough under the best of circumstances, but made even more difficult, purposefully, for millions of Americans. My Republican friends have decided to take out their differences with the IRS by deliberately torturing the American taxpayer. Ours is the largest tax system in the world that relies primarily on voluntary compliance. Most Americans, in fact, do comply, but an ever- increasingly complex tax system makes that compliance difficult. It should be noted that it is not the IRS that makes the Tax Code complex; it is Congress that makes the Tax Code complex, a Congress that is sometimes so late in meeting its obligations with tax changes that the Service has difficulty even printing the forms on time as these changes occur every single year. In order to help citizens with Congress' complex tax system, the Internal Revenue Service runs the largest consumer service operation in the world, but this process has been deliberately sabotaged by the Republican approach to the agency budget. The agency has 30,000 fewer employees today than it had in 1992. The real budget adjusted for inflation is about the level we had in 1998, when we had fewer taxpayers filing returns and a Tax Code that was smaller and less complicated.…”